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Improving Participation in Wikis

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For those of you who are the administrators/facilitators of a group wiki:

The DARwiki has some hints and tips for improving and promoting participation in community-based wikis. Some DOs and DON’Ts that are mentioned include:
-DON’T create empty pages
-DON’T do it all yourself
-DON’T over organize
-DO initiate a wiki project (focus on a specific page or set of pages for a limited time period)
-DO design a good FAQ for the wiki

Also check out Meredith Farkas’ (“Queen of Wikis”) comments on these tips.

Comments

  1. Simon Fodden
    January 18th, 2007 at 11:02 am

    Thanks, Agnese. this is helpful, because I’ve got a bit of wkiphobia. I think it comes from being something of a control freak. Still, it’s something I need to learn about through experience. Have any Slawyers started a wiki? Any experiences to relate?

  2. Connie Crosby
    January 18th, 2007 at 2:43 pm

    Thanks, Agnese. Very helpful for me, too. I’ve just initiated our first in-office wiki for a particular project, with a limited number of participants and for a limited period of time. We’re just at the stage where I am trying to get people up and using it. Simon, thus far people see it as a website, and not a lot gets edited except for people sending me things to add. So, the control part isn’t really the issue. The issue is figuring out how to get people to participate, much the same as with a group blog. ;-)

    I have been using wikis for a number of other things, work and professional activity related. If you wait a few days, I can point you to the LLRX.com column I wrote for January, all about my wiki projects! 8-)

    And I just discovered Meredith Farkas’ blog Information Wants to be Free this week. I’d heard about it for a long while, but had never read it. She has some amazing comments and ideas on a lot of things I am interested in.

    Agnese, are you wikiing? (is that a word?)

  3. Agnese Caruso
    January 18th, 2007 at 4:27 pm

    Yes, I have been contributing to the SLA Business & Finance division Resources wiki (check out the “Accounting & Taxation” and “M&A” pages). I’m not the administrator for this wiki, but so far I’ve enjoyed contributing to it! Its such a great efficient way to share information among a big group of people (certainly better than via email or a static webpage).
    https://slabfresources.pbwiki.com/

    I am the administrator and facilitator of a personal wiki I set up on pbwiki. Friends and I are going to New York City next month so I set up a wiki for everyone to share with each other what they want to see. Each friend has her/his own page to fill with links and photos of restaurants/stores/tourist places we want to vist. The places that are mentioned the most times on the wiki is where we’ll be spending the most time on our trip. Everyone agreed that setting up the wiki was a great idea, but many of my friends still have empty pages. They tell me they don’t know how to edit their pages and they feel weird messing up a website I created. I recommend adding a Wiki Admin section on the homepage that links to information on how to create a new page, editing an existing page, etc. I also included a link to the pbwiki Style page, and I also created a practice page called Sandbox where they can try out what they learned. It is definitely a challenge to get people to contribute to a wiki; I think wikis are very much a new tool for many people.